The title of the book comes from one of Sondheim's most famous lyrics, from his musical about Georges Seurat, the French impressionist. It's a meditation on the exquisite joy of artistic creativity - of creating something out of nothing, even when that something is sort of nothing, and your lover has just walked out:

And when the woman that you wanted goes,You can say to yourself, “Well, I give what I give.”But the woman who won’t wait for you knowsThat however you live,There’s a part of you always standing by,Mapping out the sky,Finishing a hat . . .Starting on a hat . . .Finishing a hat . . .Look I made a hat . . .Where there never was a hat.

(This, by the way, is a lyric that makes Teller, of Penn and Teller, weep.) In the book, Sondheim reveals that he's not very proud of the lyrics to Maria, from West Side Story. Egged on by his collaborator Leonard Bernstein, he feels that he wrote something a little too sentimental; too wet. Simon responds:

Sondheim’s regret about “Maria” reminded me of my own reluctance to add a third verse to “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” I thought of the song as a simple two-verse hymn, but our producer argued that the song wanted to be bigger and more dramatic. I reluctantly agreed and wrote the “Sail on silvergirl” verse there in the recording studio. I never felt it truly belonged. Audiences disagreed with both Sondheim and me. “Maria” is beloved, and “Sail on silvergirl” is the well-known and highly anticipated third verse of “Bridge.” Sometimes it’s good to be “wet.”

October 28, 2010

“With all due candour, appearing on your own reality show on the Discovery Channel, I am not certain how that fits in the American calculus of 'that helps me see you in the Oval Office’,” Mr Rove told The Daily Telegraph in an interview...

...Mr Rove, who remains a major force on the US political scene, also implied that Mrs Palin lacked the stomach for the rigours of a presidential primary campaign, which will begin early next year before the first polls in 2012... “You can make a plausible case for any of them on paper, but it is not going to be paper in 2011. It’s going to be blood, it’s going to be sweat and tears and it’s going to be hard effort.”

This is interesting not just for its content but because he says it publicly - which implies that the man who understands GOP politics better than anyone else has sized Palin up and decided she's a loser.

Although Obama long ago healed any post-primary differences with Hillary Clinton, he has never quite bonded with Bill, which is a pity, because whatever he may think of the last Democratic president's flaws, he ought to be able to see that he has plenty to learn from him.

Perhaps he is getting there. Having realised that he didn't give enough thought to communication in his first eighteen months in office he may now be listening to the master communicator's advice. The Washington Post's Dana Milbank has spotted something interesting. Here's a passage from Obama's current stump speech:

"It's a choice between the past and the future; a choice between hope and fear; a choice between falling backwards and moving forwards. And I don't know about you, but I want to move forward. I don't want to go backward."

Here's Bill Clinton in 1994 at the same point in his electoral cycle:

"Ladies and gentlemen, this election, all over America, represents a choice, a choice between hope and fear . . . between whether we're going forward or we're going to go back. I think I know the answer to that. You want to keep going forward."

This may well be coincidence; the boiler plate of a politician about to take a beating. Here's hoping it's because Big Dog has been whispering into the current president's ear - and that this is a sign of improved relations.

Ps I don't mean to imply that this particular advice - if that's what it is - will do any good. After all, things didn't go so well for Clinton in 1994.

Pps Note the subtle difference between the two passages and the superiority of Clinton's phrasing. Obama tells us something about himself: "I want to go forward." Clinton acknowledges something about his audience: "You want to keep going forward", implying humility and empathy.

October 27, 2010

John Rentoul's excellent column (from Sunday) provokes several thoughts. Here's one for now: the Tories ought to be worried about the alarming cockiness exhibited by their Chancellor.

Of course, there is the whole strategy of trying to eliminate the deficit within four years, which is arguably reckless in itself (although I doubt this will actually happen; it's partly about signalling). But the specific incident that should worry cooler heads on the Conservative benches was Osborne's claim, at the end of his speech on the CSR, to have announced a smaller programme of cuts than was planned by Labour. This was entirely spurious, a trick of the numbers, and was almost immediately exposed as such by the press and think-tanks.

Why did he do it? He watched Gordon Brown pull similar stunts, year after year, and saw how it rebounded on his credibility in the end. He must know that as he takes these grave and painful decisions, the last thing he can afford to be painted as is overly political. Yet he couldn't resist. Presumably because, right now, he feels as if he can't do anything wrong.

For those of us who haven't experienced it, it's hard to imagine the ferocious assault on the nervous system that high office makes on a politician who has never held a government position. The sheer intoxicating rush that comes with entry to Downing Street, ministerial cars and red boxes; the machinery of state at your command. How a person responds to this depends on personality and situation, but there are two opposing dangers: one is that you lose confidence, intimidated by it all; the other is that you become carried away with your own brilliance (a war can have the same effect; Martin Amis said something to the effect that Donald Rumsfeld, in his early press conferences on Iraq, gave the impression of a man who had just plunged his face into a bowl of cocaine).

Abraham Lincoln, as ever, nailed it: "Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power."

We are witnessing a severe test of the Chancellor's character; and probably not quite the test he thinks it is.

(As I've noted before, this governement's first-term problem will probably come to be seen as the opposite of Labour's first term problem; over-confidence, as opposed to under-confidence.)

"Queuing theory" is a growing field of academic study, apparently, and a well-funded one, since there are so many corporations with an interest in maximising queue efficiency; supermarkets, theme parks, vendors of hot cakes. A piece in Popular Mechanics (a racier read than you'd think) lays out some of the jargon: Faffing is the time delay when a person gathers his things after paying at the checkout—an average of 3.17 seconds (I suspect this helps to explain why those one-basket queues never gain you much time), Reneging is when a customer leaves a queue he believes he has spent too much time waiting in (and joins another that moves even more slowly), and the Balking Index is part of an equation that predicts when someone will turn away from a line that he feels is too long. Presumably he does so at y = "Point at which that queue is just about to get much shorter".

October 26, 2010

Just days before New York’s Republican gubernatorial primary, Carl Paladino mailed out thousands of campaign ads impregnated with the smell of rotting garbage. Emblazoned with the message “Something Stinks in Albany” and photos of scandal-tainted New York Democrats like former Gov. Eliot Spitzer and Representative Charles Rangel, the brochure attacked Mr. Paladino’s rival, former Representative Rick Lazio, for being “liberal” and a part of the state’s corrupt political system.

The article goes on to speculate that such stinkmail might actually serve a subtle psycho-political purpose:

In an experiment conducted recently by Erik Helzer, a Cornell Ph.D. student, and one of us (David Pizarro), merely standing near a hand-sanitizing dispenser led people to report more conservative political beliefs. Participants who were randomly positioned in front of a hand sanitizer gave more conservative responses to a survey about their moral, social and fiscal attitudes than those individuals assigned to complete the questionnaire at the other end of the hallway. In another experiment one of us (Dr. Pizarro) was involved in, a foul ambient smell — emitted, unbeknownst to test subjects, by a novelty spray — caused people answering a questionnaire to report more negative attitudes toward gay men than did people who responded in the absence of the stench. Apparently, the slightest signal that germs might be present is enough to shift political attitudes toward the right.

I hope Ed Miliband's team read this. Come the next election they should stinkbomb every Conservative office in the country. In the meantime, perhaps they should talk to some stink-tanks.

October 25, 2010

In this thoughtful, witty editorial the cognitive psychologist and memory specialist Amanda Barnier reflects on the way that her iPhone is becoming a part of her extended mind, as she increasingly relies on it to substitute for her own faulty memory processes:

As a full-time academic and mother of two small children – a five-year-old son just starting school and an 18-month-old daughter yet to sleep through the night – I am chronically sleep deprived. Perhaps as a result of one or more of these circumstances, in the past year I have experienced memory difficulties: forgetting words, forgetting appointments, forgetting my wallet, forgetting my children, etc. To compensate, I now rely on – and have altered my memory practices to best integrate with – a range of iPhone applications (‘apps’) that: keep track of my appointments; collect, organize and remind me of tasks at work and home; warn me of family and friends’ birthdays or to pay bills; remember my menu plan for the week and the groceries I need to buy; record events that happen each day; and even tell me what I should be doing at any moment of the day...together, my iPhone and I currently are more successful than just me alone.

Barnier places her relationship with her iPhone in the wider context of what psychologists call "social scaffolding"; the way we arrange our environment, and especially our relationships, to aid our mental processing and to compensate for our individual shortcomings. Married couples outsource parts of their memory to each other, and reconstruct the story of their life together in collaboration; when a couple is parted, through divorce or death, they lose a part of their minds. Similarly, if you take a person with Alzheimer's out of a very familiar environment and place them somewhere, they may be losing some of the remaining strands keeping them attached to reality.

Barnier imagines that losing her iPhone will be, in a trivial way, something like a bereavement.

When Ed Miliband makes his first big speech on the economy he might want to sprinkle a little light swearing into his opening paragraphs:

To see whether swearing can help change attitudes, Scherer and Sagarin (2006) divided 88 participants into three groups to watch one of three slightly different speeches. The only difference between the speeches was that one contained a mild swear word at the start:

"…lowering of tuition is not only a great idea, but damn it, also the most reasonable one for all parties involved."

The second speech contained the 'damn it' at the end and the third had neither. When participants' attitudes were measured, they were most influenced by the speeches with the mild obscenity included, either at the beginning or the end. It also emerged that the word 'damn' increased the audience's perception of the speaker's intensity, which was what lead to the increased levels of persuasion.

This knowledge that intensity helps to persuade should be used with caution. Otherwise, you may come off sounding like this.

I don't know if the swearing technique would ever work in Britain anyway, because the main light swear words - damn, bloody - make you sound posh ("I think we're cutting too damn fast, Clarissa") and the other ones make you sound crude or rude: "The Conservatives are pissing all over us," "Osborne has farked this right up innee". Americans can employ a broader vernacular range in public speech.

October 22, 2010

Politico has an enjoyably gossipy piece about how Sarah Palin has been annoying more GOP figures than she has been helping in this election cycle, by virture of her chaotic and capricious modus operandi. Many candidates have sought her endorsement. Some have been played along until the plug is pulled, others have got it but have then had to suffer her refusal to do anything that might actually, you know, help them:

Late last Friday afternoon, Palin’s political aide, Andy Davis, contacted officials with a competitive House campaign. The former governor would be available Tuesday, Davis said. As with Grassley, the reaction of the House campaign was to have Palin do a fundraiser. “What [the candidate] needs more than anything else is money,” said a GOP source familiar with the situation. No-go, replied Davis, indicating that not only did she not want to raise money, but she also didn’t want to do a rally...Without much media attention, such a grass-roots event would have done next to nothing for the candidate, said the source close to the situation. But the campaign — a lean operation, like those of most House candidates — scrambled to put together another plan that would accommodate Palin. They sent it to Davis on Saturday.

The campaign didn’t get word until Monday morning, the day before the event was to take place, that Palin’s schedule had changed. She couldn’t come. Palin offered no reason for the no-show.

The story also alleges that she charges the campaigns for her team's travel (a breach of etiquette, apparently) and changes her mind on just about everything at the last minute.

All of which should remind those who need reminding that there's no way she'll lead a credible presidential campaign in 2012. When comparisons are made with Obama '08, people tend to focus on was the way he was able to mobilise thousands of grassroots supporters who otherwise wouldn't have got involved, thus changing the rules of the primary game. Palin - a similarly charismatic figure - can do the same, they say. But the bit they leave out was equally if not more important: the ferocious discipline of the Obama operation, evident from the moment it started preparing the ground in 2007, and maintained throughout the campaign. He and his team patiently nurtured relationships inside the party and built their own structures outside it. They planned everything down to the last sticker. This is what enabled them to turn grassroots enthusiasm and cash into hard votes, time after time. Obama's victory wasn't a coup de theatre, it was a long, slow, often tedious grind.

For all his flair, Obama was very, very good at the boring stuff. Sarah Palin is not - and it seems clear to me that she never will be.

October 21, 2010

This superb-looking contraption was the iPad of its day (or maybe whatever the quickly obsolete precursor of the iPad was). The Malling-Hansen writing ball, prototyped in 1865, was the world's first commercially produced typewriter. Nietszche used it, although his was defective, although perhaps he preferred it that way.

It entered production in 1870. Three years later along came the QWERTY keyboard, which blew it away, mainly because you could actually see what you were typing, which for some reason people liked.

It's often noted that the QWERTY keyboard design makes no logical sense but has become standard purely by being standard for so long that no other keyboard can break through. Less often noted is that there is a trace of its origin in the top row of keys, which contains all the letters you need to spell out TYPEWRITER. This was to assist salesman who wanted to demonstrate the typing of a word to their customers, without taking an embarassingly long time working out where to find each letter.

October 20, 2010

Back in June, after the emergency budget, I wrote a post for Prospect suggesting that the most rational strategy for George Osborne would be to signal to the world that he is making huge cuts whilst actually making modest ones:

(A)t its heart, this is a question of communication...The optimal strategy for our government, and for all European governments, is to manipulate perceptions while inflicting minimum real-world pain. Governments ought to pursue fake austerity programmes; to talk big about slashing costs and shrinking the state while, in reality, only making the most superficial of cuts. This would restore confidence amongst market-makers and consumers that the problem is being dealt with, while saving millions of people from the misery of unemployment. If we’re going to administer medicine, it should be a placebo.

The phrase “3 percent cut over four years” puts into perspective phrases like “bloodiest cuts since the war/the 20s/since man discovered fire”. Strikingly, in cash terms, the cuts are £23.3bn by 2014-15. I kept hearing this figure of £83bn cuts, which the Treasury refers to, and couldn’t see it anywhere in the CSR. Turns out the sum is produced by quadruple-counting: the cuts in 2011-12 added to the cuts of 2012-13 added to 2013-14 etc. Brown used this disingenuous tactic to exaggerate spending. Just why the government would want to exaggerate the scale of its cuts I don’t know.

October 19, 2010

On Monday night, Andrew Cuomo, Carl Paladino and the other candidates to be governor of the Empire State took part in the first and possibly last debate of the campaign. Apparently it was a bit of a circus. But then this is New York, the greatest circus of all, where every sideshow stars a minor genius: